So here is the issue. I have owned a Gemstar REB for about 5 years now. I absolutely love it. The quality of the screen is amazing, and with the 1 gig card I have in it, I have a ton of titles.

The problem of course here is two fold:

1: Gemstar is out of business. No more books. *sigh*

2: I want to get a new ebook, but I need similar features. My biggest priorities are a good, readable screen, and most important of all, it MUST be backlit. This is to allow me to read at night after wifey has gone to bed.

So the question is, of the current ebooks out there, what ones are large screen, backlit, and come from a quality company.

Look wise, I am totally taken by the Hanlin eReader, but I can’t tell from what I’ve read if it is back lit or not.

Also, having the capability to read PDF is another very high on my list. There are certain titles I have that are public domain so I can update them to an ebook that excepts TXT or PDF, but more importantly a few of our favorite authors (ok 1 in particular) has all her books on PDF format.

Well, not really. If you migrate your ebook, you can buy books from eBookWise. Admittedly, they may not have a wide range of ebooks, but I don't think that anyone really has that (unless Amazon comes out with the Kindle, of course).

Quote:

2: I want to get a new ebook, but I need similar features. My biggest priorities are a good, readable screen, and most important of all, it MUST be backlit. This is to allow me to read at night after wifey has gone to bed.

So the question is, of the current ebooks out there, what ones are large screen, backlit, and come from a quality company.

Look wise, I am totally taken by the Hanlin eReader, but I can’t tell from what I’ve read if it is back lit or not.

Also, having the capability to read PDF is another very high on my list. There are certain titles I have that are public domain so I can update them to an ebook that excepts TXT or PDF, but more importantly a few of our favorite authors (ok 1 in particular) has all her books on PDF format.

So please advice away! And glad to be here.

All of the eInk readers are not back lit, you will have to use an external light source for reading.

Also, you can read PDFs on your ebook using PDFRead -- I created the tool for the very same reason, reading PDFs on my 1100 (see mobileread thread). I personally am going to wait till eInk becomes more widespread with falling prices and greater reliability.

I would suggest that you try the above ideas and see if they suit you. If it ain't broke, don't fix it

Also, you can read PDFs on your ebook using PDFRead -- I created the tool for the very same reason, reading PDFs on my 1100 (see mobileread thread). I personally am going to wait till eInk becomes more widespread with falling prices and greater reliability.

I would suggest that you try the above ideas and see if they suit you. If it ain't broke, don't fix it

Thanks! I Tried PDFRead last night, and while it converted a document just fine, when I tried to open it useing ..oh gosh now that I'm at work I forgot the name, it's somethingPublisher (so I can import it into my REB1200) the file would not open. But the PDF conversion seemed to work ok. I just don't know how to test it before I go that direction.

So, what program then, after useing PDFRead should I use to import into the book?

Thanks for the info so far! Great thing about the old Gemstar (it's the eBookWise ETI-1 or whatever it's called) is the backlite... pitty that won't work with eInk.

Ok, I tried PDFRead last night. it converts fine but the program I used to try to import (somethingPublisher) didn't work for the converted file. It wouldn't even open it.

Sooooooo after you use PDFRead what do you use for uploading your own documents to your REB?

I assume that you have the latest eBook Publisher installed (if you're not sure, then please download and install it). The end result is an IMP file, which you can transfer to the ebook in multiple ways. I myself prefer GEBLibrarian, I set it up so that the output of PDFRead directly goes into the library folder so when I (re)start GEBLibrarian the newly converted book automatically shows up in the listing. After that, I just use the "online bookshelf" feature on the ebook to pick what to read from the GEBLibrarian bookshelf.